Key Translations & Further Reading

The reason for the divergence is set out on the history page and is worth repeating in one sentence: the base text is a terse divination manual, the philosophy was added by later commentaries, and every translator has to decide how much of the commentarial tradition to build into the translation itself. Translators who make opposite decisions produce opposite books, and both can be defended.

Four kinds of edition

Before any names, it helps to know that editions fall into four groups.

The first presents the received text as understood through the later orthodox tradition, blending base text and commentary into a continuous, readable, philosophically rich whole. The second reconstructs the base text as an early divination document, stripping the later interpretation out. The third translates the base text together with one named commentary, so you can see exactly whose reading you are getting. The fourth is designed for use in consultation, with the interpretive material arranged for quick reference.

These are different projects. Complaining that a reconstruction is dry, or that an oracle edition is unscholarly, is usually a category error. The useful question is which project you want.

The standard Western edition

Richard Wilhelm's German translation, completed in the 1920s, is the version through which the book became known outside East Asia. Wilhelm worked in Qingdao and studied with Lao Naixuan, a scholar of the old school, and the translation transmits the interpretation that had become orthodox in later dynasties — broadly the Song reading, moral and cosmological in emphasis. Cary Baynes rendered it into English, published at mid-century with a foreword by Carl Jung, and that edition became the standard for two generations.

Its strengths are real. It is complete, it includes the appended commentaries, it is internally consistent, and it is written with unusual dignity. Its weaknesses are equally real. It presents a particular late interpretation as the meaning of an ancient text, it silently smooths passages that are obscure in the original, and its English is heavily influenced by the German idealist vocabulary Wilhelm had available. Jung's foreword, whatever one thinks of it, attached the book to a set of psychological ideas that are not in it.

The practical recommendation is to read it, and to read it knowing what it is. It is the reason the book is famous in English, and its influence on every later popular edition is enormous.

James Legge's translation of the 1880s is worth knowing about as the first serious English attempt. It is careful, densely annotated, and written in the elevated register Victorian scholars used for scripture. It is now mainly of historical interest, and its wide availability in free reprints means it is often the version a curious reader stumbles into first, which is unfortunate.

Reconstructions of the earliest text

If you want to know what the base text says before the philosophy was added, three works matter.

Richard Rutt's The Book of Changes (Zhouyi): A Bronze Age Document translates the base text as what the evidence suggests it is, with extensive discussion of the divinatory formulae and the historical setting. It is deliberately unspiritual, and reading it immediately after Wilhelm is one of the most instructive experiences available to a student of this text.

Edward Shaughnessy's I Ching: The Classic of Changes translates the silk manuscript recovered from a Han tomb, including the previously unknown commentaries found with it. His later Unearthing the Changes discusses the excavated materials more broadly. Between them these give access to the manuscript evidence that has reshaped the field.

Richard Kunst's doctoral work on the original text is a standard reference in the scholarly literature on the base text's language and formulae, and is worth pursuing if you become seriously interested in the philology.

Translations of a named commentary

This group is the most useful and the least known, because it removes the central ambiguity: you know whose reading you have.

Richard John Lynn's The Classic of Changes translates the base text with the third-century commentary that became standard for centuries. Since that reading is philosophical rather than correlative and treats the hexagrams as accounts of situation and conduct, it shows where much of what Western readers find attractive in the book actually comes from.

Joseph Adler has translated the major Song commentary that became the orthodox reading under later dynasties, along with the same author's shorter introduction to the study of the text. Reading these alongside Wilhelm makes visible how much of Wilhelm is that commentary rather than the classic.

For the Taoist reading specifically, Thomas Cleary's The Taoist I Ching translates a Qing-dynasty internal alchemical commentary. It should be read as what it is — one late tradition's use of the figures — rather than as the Taoist meaning of the book.

Editions for consultation

John Blofeld's translation is short, plain and practical, with the divinatory function treated matter-of-factly and without inflation. Alfred Huang's The Complete I Ching presents the text with the appended commentaries and a Chinese practitioner's framing, and is useful for seeing how the layers are conventionally assembled. Stephen Karcher's work, including the version produced with Rudolf Ritsema, takes a deliberately non-smoothing approach, keeping the Chinese terms visible and resisting interpretive closure; some readers find this illuminating and others find it unusable.

A general caution about this category. Popular oracle editions vary enormously in how much they invent. A useful test is whether the edition distinguishes the base text from its own commentary. If you cannot tell where the ancient text ends and the modern author begins, the edition is not trustworthy, however pleasant it is to read.

Chinese-language editions

If you read Chinese, the situation is better, because the layers are typographically separated by convention and you can see immediately what is classic, what is commentary and whose.

The traditional core is the third-century commentary with its continuation, and the Tang subcommentary that accompanies it in the standard classical edition. For the orthodox later reading, the Song commentary is available in many printings. For a modern critical treatment of the base text as an early document, Gao Heng's annotated reconstruction is the usual starting point, and Li Jingchi's work on the text is a standard companion. Among modern annotated editions intended for general readers, the translation and commentary by Huang Shouqi and Zhang Shanwen is widely used and clearly laid out.

What to look for in any Chinese edition: whether it prints the base text separately from the appended commentaries, whether it identifies which commentator it follows, and whether its notes distinguish philological explanation from interpretation. Editions that fail all three are common and are best avoided.

Studies and background

Reading about the book is often more efficient than reading the book, at least at the start.

Michael Nylan's The Five "Confucian" Classics places the text in the canon and explains what canonisation meant institutionally. Richard J. Smith's Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World is the fullest single account of the text's history and uses in China, and his shorter The I Ching: A Biography covers the same ground more briefly, including the reception abroad. Geoffrey Redmond and Tze-ki Hon's Teaching the I Ching is written for people who have to explain the text to others and is unusually clear about what is and is not established.

For the wider intellectual setting, Benjamin Schwartz's The World of Thought in Ancient China remains a good survey of the period in which the appended commentaries were composed. For the correlative systems and their role in Chinese science, the relevant volume of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China is essential and also sharply critical of the Book of Changes as an obstacle to enquiry; the criticism is worth reading precisely because most introductions avoid it.

For the Taoist dimension

To follow the trigrams into Taoist cultivation, start with Fabrizio Pregadio's translation of the second-century alchemical classic, The Seal of the Unity of the Three, which is annotated in enough detail that the notation becomes legible. His other work on alchemy, and the reference material he has edited, will take you further.

Isabelle Robinet's writing on internal alchemy and on the history of Taoism is the standard scholarly point of entry, and her work is particularly good at showing how the hexagram notation was used and altered. Thomas Cleary has translated a large amount of alchemical material; the translations are readable and the apparatus is thin, so they are best used after you know the framework.

A suggested order

For a reader starting from nothing, the following order avoids most of the usual frustrations.

Read a short study first — the shorter of Smith's two books, or Redmond and Hon — so that you know what kind of object you are handling. Then read Rutt or Shaughnessy, to see the base text without the philosophy. Then read Wilhelm, which will now be legible as an interpretation rather than mistaken for the text. Then read Lynn, to see one named commentary doing its work. Only after that is there much point in reading the appended commentaries closely, and only after that will an oracle edition tell you anything you could not have got from a coin and a good memory.

If your interest is Taoist practice rather than the classic itself, the shortcut is to read the trigrams and hexagrams pages on this site, then go directly to Pregadio, and return to the classic later if at all.

Cautions

Beware editions that promise the original or the authentic meaning. The manuscript evidence shows variety at the earliest point we can reach, so there is no single original meaning to recover.

Beware editions that do not tell you what they are doing. A translator with a defensible method says so in the introduction. A translator who does not is usually blending sources.

Beware secondary works that quote the appended commentaries as if they were the ancient core, which is extremely common in popular writing on Chinese thought generally.

And beware of assuming that a difficult translation is a faithful one, or that a readable one is a loose one. Some of the most literal renderings are perfectly clear, and some of the most obscure are obscure because the translator has added a theory.

Key points

• With this text the choice of translation determines what book you read, not merely how it reads.
• Editions fall into four kinds: orthodox-tradition, early-text reconstruction, named-commentary, and consultation.
• Wilhelm and Baynes is the historically decisive English version and transmits a specific late interpretation; read it knowing that.
• Rutt and Shaughnessy give the base text and the excavated manuscripts; reading them against Wilhelm is the fastest education available.
• Named-commentary translations, especially Lynn and Adler, remove the central ambiguity about whose reading you have.
• For the Taoist use of the figures, Pregadio's annotated alchemical translation is the practical entry point.